The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of
Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like
to announce ‘The Politics of the Street and New Forms of
Alliance’, a lecture by Judith Butler within the lecture
series ‘The State of Things’.

Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been
replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere
within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode
of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that
there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a
'space of appearance' and even 'a right to appear'. How do we
understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form
alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied
'we' on the street transported through media, and yet in place and
at risk?

About Judith Butler

Judith Butler (b.1956, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, lives
and works in Berkeley, California, USA) is Maxine Elliot Professor
in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the
Co-Director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of, among others,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
‘Sex’ (1993), Excitable Speech (1997) and Is
Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(co-written with Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Wendy Brown in 2009).
She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights,
anti-war politics and Jewish Voice for Peace. Butler is presently
the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic
Achievement in the Humanities.

About The State of Things

'The State of Things' is a series of public lectures that is
held throughout the biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as
diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital,
migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each
presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing
from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what
they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.
The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by
Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World
War I in an attempt to enable refugees move across borders in
search of political and intellectual shelter.

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of
Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia,
would like to announce 'Movimento Studentesco and Pier
Paolo Pasolini: A Misunderstanding', a
lecture by Franco Berardi within the lecture
series ‘The State of Things’.

In 1968 the relation between Pier Paolo Pasolini and
the Student Movement in Italy was a troubled one. In the midst of
the controversy, Pasolini was accused by the students of being a
populist representative of a backward culture, nostalgic of a
legendary pre-modern time. This paper will argue that, from today's
perspective, things seem different, and Pasolini can be understood
not to have been looking to the past but to the distant future that
is now our present: an age characterised by barbarianism and of
ignorant aggressiveness. Today, in the age of the televisual and
financial dictatorship, reading Pasolini is a way to retrace the
genesis of Italy's present.

About Franco Berardi

Franco Berardi (b.1949, Bologna, Italy) founded the
magazine A/traverso (1975–81) and was part of the staff of
Radio Alice (1976–78). After being involved in the political
movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, Berardi fled to
Paris, where he worked with philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix
Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis during the 1980s. He
currently teaches social history of the media at the Accademia di
Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and is the founder of the European
School of Social Imagination (SCEPSI) which was inaugurated in San
Marino in May 2011.

About ‘The State of Things’

`The State of Things’ is a series of public
lectures that will be held throughout the biennale period,
reflecting upon themes such as diversity, the environment,
peace-making, human rights, capital, migration, asylum, Europe,
aesthetics and revolution. Each presentation aims to tackle the
‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speakers’ fields of
activity and research, and from what they consider the intellectual
and political priorities of today. The programme takes its cue from
the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer
Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable
refugees move across borders in search of political and
intellectual shelter.

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

Please note that if
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About ‘The State of Things’

‘The State of Things’ is a series of public lectures that is
held throughout the biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as
diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital,
migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each
presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing
from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what
they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.
The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by
Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World
War I in an attempt to enable refugees move across borders in
search of political and intellectual shelter.

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

A K Dolven has been invited by the
Folkestone Triennial 2011 to present her new work
Out of Tune. Specially commissioned by curator Andrea
Schlieker, Out of Tune is a conceptual site-specific sound
installation in dialogue with Dolven's previous works Untuned
Bell and The Finnish Untuned Bell. Untuned
Bell was temporary installed in a city square in Oslo in
spring 2010, while The Finnish Untuned Bell
erected in May 2011 is a permanent site-specific installation
made in memory of the Finnish modernist thinker and painter Helene
Schjerfbeck in Ekenäs, Finland. Out of Tune in Folkestone
is a temporary installation and borrows a grounded 16th century
bell from Scraptoft Church, Leicester. The Tenor Bell has been
suspended between two tall steel beams, adding a rope for viewers
to ring the bell. According to the artist, the idea of being out of
tune is 'an appropriate metaphor for the theme of the 2011
Folkestone Triennial. Titled A Million Miles From Home,
the second triennial invites artistic responses to the situations
of displacement, migration, and not belonging – drawing on
Folkestone's own geographical position on the southeastern tip of
England, and its symbolic position as a gateway to Europe and
further afield.' Dolven's project addresses 'not only the universal
themes of difference and being out of tune, it also incorporates a
range of local concerns in Folkestone'. Out of Tune is situated on
the seafront of Folkestone, in the space left vacant by a former
amusement park.

About the Folkestone Triennial
The Folkestone Triennial seeks to engage and inspire the
communities of the town while also finding a fresh way of bringing
contemporary art to the fore. Located in the seaside town of
Folkestone on the south-east coast of England, artists are invited
to use the town as their 'canvas', utilising public spaces to
create striking pieces that reflect issues affecting both the town
and the wider world.

Support
A K Dolven’s participation in the Folkestone Triennial 2011 has
been supported by OCA’s International Support Programme.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of
Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia,
would like to announce ‘Forensic Aesthetics’, a
lecture by Eyal Weizman within the lecture series
‘The State of Things’.

About ‘Forensic Aesthetics’

The last decades of the twentieth century, often referred to as
'the era of the witness', were saturated with representation of
testimonies of trauma – written, recorded, filmed archived and
exhibited. This primacy of trauma as a site of history also lead to
a depoliticised 'politics of compassion' apparent in the forums of
transitional justice, truth commissions, human rights and
humanitarianism. However, a recent shift of emphasis from human
testimony to material forensics means that science has begun
invading some of the legal and cultural grounds previously reserved
for the speech of humans. Potentially, therefore, at its most
extreme, new ways of using forensic science have blurred a
previously held distinction: between evidence, when the law speaks
of objects, and that of the witness, referring to subjects. Such
shift has aesthetic, political and ethical implications, dangers
and potentials that will be unpacked in this lecture.

About Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman (b.1970, Haifa, Israel, lives and
works in London, UK) is an architect and the Director of the Centre
for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Since 2007 he is a member of the architectural collective
‘decolonizing architecture’ in Beit Sahour/Palestine, and since
2008 of B'Tselem board of directors. Weizman has taught, lectured,
curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide.
His books include Il male minore (2009), Hollow Land:
Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), A Civilian
Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Occupation (2003), and the
series Territories 1, 2 and 3. He is a
regular contributor and an editorial board member for several
journals and magazines including Humanity,
Cabinet and Inflexions.

About ‘The State of Things’

‘The State of Things’ is a series of public
lectures that will be held throughout the biennale period,
reflecting upon themes such as diversity, the environment,
peace-making, human rights, capital, migration, asylum, Europe,
aesthetics and revolution. Each presentation aims to tackle the
‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speakers’ fields of
activity and research, and from what they consider the intellectual
and political priorities of today. The programme takes its cue from
the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer
Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable
refugees move across borders in search of political and
intellectual shelter.

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA
and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate
curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston
University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes
‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about
AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty
of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

‘The State of Things’ has been generously supported by Fritt Ord
.

Map to the venue:

Clyde Snow presents a slide of the skull of Liliana Pereyra, in the 1985 trial of members of the Argentine junta for crimes committed in the 'dirty war' (1976–1983).